The Making of Hollywood Production: Televising and Visualizing Global Filmmaking in 1960S Promotional Featurettes

The Making of Hollywood Production: Televising and Visualizing Global Filmmaking in 1960s Promotional Featurettes by DANIEL STEINHART Abstract: Before making-of documentaries became a regular part of home-video special features, 1960s promotional featurettes brought the public a behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood’s production process. Based on historical evidence, this article explores the changes in Hollywood promotions when studios broadcasted these featurettes on television to market theatrical films and contracted out promotional campaigns to boutique advertising agencies. The making-of form matured in the 1960s as featurettes helped solidify some enduring conventions about the portrayal of filmmaking. Ultimately, featurettes serve as important paratexts for understanding how Hollywood’s global production work was promoted during a time of industry transition. aking-of documentaries have long made Hollywood’s flm production process visible to the public. Before becoming a staple of DVD and Blu-ray spe- M cial features, early forms of making-ofs gave audiences a view of the inner workings of Hollywood flmmaking and movie companies. Shortly after its formation, 20th Century-Fox produced in 1936 a flmed studio tour that exhibited the company’s diferent departments on the studio lot, a key feature of Hollywood’s detailed division of labor. Even as studio-tour short subjects became less common because of the restructuring of studio operations after the 1948 antitrust Paramount Case, long-form trailers still conveyed behind-the-scenes information. In a trailer for The Ten Commandments (1956), director Cecil B. DeMille speaks from a library set and discusses the importance of foreign location shooting, recounting how he shot the flm in the actual Egyptian locales where Moses once walked (see Figure 1). While the studio tour promotes a revitalized company brand and the trailer adver- tises a motion picture, such behind-the-scenes shorts also manufacture a vision of flmmaking that reveals the changing dynamics of the flm industry in the United States. These marketing practices coalesced in the 1960s in the form of what Hol- lywood called “promotional featurettes,” which captured the production of a single feature flm usually in fve to ten minutes and played to a wide audience before Daniel Steinhart is assistant professor of cinema studies at the University of Oregon. His book Runaway Holly- wood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting is forthcoming from the University of California Press. Press © 2018 by the University of Texas 96 Summer 2018 | 57 | No. 4 www.cmstudies.org 06 steinhart.indd 96 6/18/18 7:46 PM Cinema Journal 57 | No. 4 | Summer 2018 the source flm’s theatrical release. Typically shown on television, featurettes helped institute many of the conventions of today’s making-of documentaries. The growth of promotional featurettes in the 1960s took place during a time of industrial uncertainty for the Figure 1. Cecil B. DeMille uses a map to illustrate his location unit’s trek through Egypt in a long-form trailer for The Ten Commandments major Hollywood stu- (Paramount, 1956). dios when the flm business was volatile. Hits like Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) and The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) ofered fnancial promise, but these successes were undercut by costly fops such as Cleopatra ( Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann, 1964). In an attempt to bring some stability to the flm business, conglomerates such as Gulf + Western, Transamerica, and Kinney took over the major studios. These conglomerates diversifed their risk by injecting money from their other businesses into the ailing studios while selling of studio back lots and reducing the number of releases. Still, little seemed to help the studios. Even as Hollywood at- tempted to tap into a vibrant and youthful counterculture at the end of the decade, the industry sufered a major slump from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, with few hits and many failures.1 Alongside these transformations, the postwar image of flm production continued to evolve from a movie colony based in Los Angeles into a moviemaking culture that extended beyond the geographical and symbolic space of Hollywood into regions around the world. Promotional featurettes in the 1960s played a critical role in promulgating this image to the public. Promoting international productions and a more global industry, however, was certainly not new. Starting in the late 1940s, Hollywood had used overseas “runaway” productions to navigate many of the changes that befell the industry.2 In the course of this expansion abroad, Hollywood studios created a global flmmaking enterprise that produced motion pictures more international in scope. By the 1960s, when the flm business was an erratic afair, promotional featurettes provided a new means to render the drama of flmmaking and the spectacle of global production, thus helping to sell Hollywood movies. Even as the rate of production abroad fuctuated through the 1960s, featurettes sustained Hollywood’s global image 1 Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960–1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 2 Thomas Guback, The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America since 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969); Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Robert R. Shandley, Runaway Romances: Hollywood’s Postwar Tour of Europe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009). 97 06 steinhart.indd 97 6/18/18 7:46 PM Cinema Journal 57 | No. 4 | Summer 2018 by promoting international pictures that had big ad budgets.3 In shaping this image of 1960s Hollywood, featurettes brought the making-of form to maturity by reinforcing several thematic conventions that persist in today’s behind-the-scenes flms. Thanks to the wide availability of making-of documentaries on home video and the internet, a growing body of literature has been examining the form. These analyses have revealed various aspects of contemporary media production and consumption: the culture of lesbian feature flmmaking, the role of making-ofs on DVD special editions, the “public disclosures” of media practitioners, and the public’s attraction to peeking behind the scenes.4 These studies show that an ancillary product like making-of documentaries can communicate a lot about how the production of media has been marketed to audiences within the past couple of decades. However, historical treatments of making-ofs remain scant. We still know little about the history of the form, how flm industries mobilized behind-the-scenes material in the past, and how making-ofs represented production work over time. This article explores that history by synthesizing archival production records, trade press coverage, interviews with veteran movie marketers, and analyses of promo flms. It shows that promotional featurettes functioned as critical paratexts that visualized production work to add value to flms and the industry as a whole. The concept of the paratext is central to understanding how featurettes helped the Hollywood flm industry promote itself. Scholars such as the late Lisa Kernan and Jonathan Gray adopted this term from Gérard Genette to characterize supplementary promotional materials that stand as key texts in their own right.5 For Kernan, movie trailers operate as paratexts by making meaning for the advertised flm while at the same time being peripheral to that flm.6 For Gray, items such as posters and video games are paratexts that go beyond the duties of marketing and proft generation to create textuality that builds a wider experience for audiences.7 Building on the work of Kernan and Gray, I argue that Hollywood promotional featurettes are paratexts that not only formulate meaning for the flm they are marketing but also give the industry a way to narrativize the production operation for public consumption. Through this process of textuality, 1960s Hollywood studios used featurettes to emphasize the global dimensions of flmmaking during a period of ongoing production decentralization and falling audience numbers. Featurettes of this era demonstrate how promotional 3 “Record H’wood Prod’n Abroad,” Daily Variety, April 14, 1960, 1, 4; “H’wood Hits Alltime Prod’n Low,” Daily Variety, December 10, 1962, 1, 4; and Peter Bart, “Increased Hollywood Production Leading to Shortage in Facilities,” New York Times, July 10, 1965, 15. 4 Kelly Hankin, “Lesbian ‘Making-of’ Documentaries and the Production of Lesbian Sex,” Velvet Light Trap 53 (Spring 2004): 26–39; Craig Hight, “Making-of Documentaries on DVD: The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Special Editions,” Velvet Light Trap 56 (Fall 2005): 4–17; John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Nicola Jean Evans, “Undoing the Magic? DVD Extras and the Pleasure behind the Scenes,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24, no. 4 (August 2010): 587–600. 5 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: The Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6 Lisa Kernan, Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). 7 Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and

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